When the “enlightened” world speaks about refugees, the only refugees that come to mind are the Arabs refugees. They are following their leaders blazing rhetoric, left Israel with the hope that the Jews will lose the war the Arab nations launched on the fledgling new Jewish state. They believed that few weeks later they would be able to return to a Jew-free country.
No one ever talks about the fact that in 1948 close to 1,000,000 Jews lived in Arab land. No one deals with the fact that upon the establishment of the State of Israel, in the early 1950’s, these Arab-Jews were expelled from the Arab countries and overnight became Jewish refugees. No one talks about the fact that had there was no State of Israel then, one million more Jews would have perished.
Thankfully, there was already Israel where these Jewish refugees found a safe sanctuary and could establish their new home. They were living in tents and corrugated iron shacks refugee camps to gradually absorbed into permanent dwellings.
After the Holocaust, the forgotten Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish refugees are the world’s second greatest injustice to Jews which the world chooses to ignore.
Whereby in 1948 one million Jews lived in the Arab countries, today their count totals only approximately forty-thousands.
So we do not forget, film producer Steven Spielberg in collaboration with Yad-Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority and the Holocaust memorial of the Jewish people in Israel, have founded a program to put on record the stories of all the Holocaust survivors.
It is now time to take a comparable action and record the stories of the Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish refugees who fled their homes in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and, Libya, leaving behind enormous wealth and hundreds, if not thousands, of years of most significant and rich Jewish history in Arab lands.
The living witnesses of the expulsion of the Jews from all Arab countries, which took place from 1949 to mid-1950’s, are now in their late 70’s-80’s. Time is running out for them to put on record this part of sad Jewish history, to record our story.
Please put on world’s record our Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish story so when we bring our case in front of the world’s Human Rights bodies and the American Congress and they tell us that there is an Arab refugee issue to settle, in turn, we can present to them our Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish refugee issue that requires even handed treatment and must be equally settled.
Just like we have put the Holocaust record straight, our duty is now to also put the Jewish refugees from all the Arab countries’ record straight.
Let us take action before it is too late.
The story must be told.
